How to reduce the value of a domain which we will lose

[dottvfan]

Hi All - bit of an unusual situation in relation to which I need your help.

For the last few years our family company has been importing a product from an overseas supplier.

Our contractual exclusivity ends in 2 months.

For the last few months we had been negotiating the new contract only to find that our supplier has by stealth granted exclusivity to another company and advised us that we will need to obtain our product from that supplier, i.e instead of having exclusivity we will now become a distributor of the new master distributor.

The contract has been sold to the new supplier on the basis that they will essentially inherit our sales so it had significant inherent value for which a fee was paid to our suppplier. As a result, our overseas supplier is essentially being paid the value of our business!

During the period of our exclusivity we have built up a website using the product name (we had a licence in our contract to register and use the domain - our contract expires in 2 months).

The value of annual sales from the website is very high and we have no doubt that we will have to hand the domain over to the new supplier.

We have decided to compete with our former supplier and sourced a superior product directly. But we will have to compete with our own hard work!

How can we reduce the value of the domain before we are inevitably forced to transfer it over? It is ranked number one on Google and all other search engines in multiple keywords after four years of SEO work etc and we are going to have to build our new website for our new product from scratch.

How can we ensure our competitor does not get the benefit of four years of backlinks and SEO work?

Please help!

By the way it is not registered in my name and I can't tell you the product name, countries etc.

 

[soggyindo]

can you TM the name, logo etc. in your country?

 

[dottvfan]

no, we can't - all rights licenced. We will have TM in our new product.

 

[soggyindo]

hmm, let me think then.

if you wanted to undo a ranking, you could also
- get 'bad' links
- sell links
- put up duplicate content for a while
- fill it with "Stop" or "kill" words - whatever they're called
- then tell the robots txt thing to stop including your site
- etc

all the things we try not to do!

but i still think there is a way for you to keep/ get rewards for your hard work.

PM'ed you with one idea.

 

[copper]

Don't you have database of your customer?
If so, send them email and let them know what's going to happen.
Also, give them your new URL and start date?

 

[dottvfan]

yes, we have our own distributor network which is of course very valuable and will support us, but a large number of sales (50%ish) come in directly through backlinks.

Our concern is essentially limiting the headstart that our competitor will have on handover. We don't want to damage their brand or act unethically just stp them from profiting from our work.

 

[Morgan]

Why not put up an Adult site?

That would ruin any good repuation etc that has been built.

 

[whitebark]

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35301

 

[dottvfan]

there are few repeat customers due to nature of product= but yes we can email them as well (and will)

 

[dottvfan]

thanks all really helpful.

Have to be careful not to damage their brand, just don't want to give them anything for free.

Any way to easily get rid of the backlinks?

 

[DotUSDomains]

you can ask google to remove the domain from there index.

not sure about the rest of the se's

alos set up some sort of forwarder to your new site, or a "landing page" with your new information on it.

also try and get as many of your visitors emails as possible,

as soon as your new product is launchd you have a good start.

And dont do what the above mentioned, if you forward it to an adult site and the name does not belong to you then your in trouble,

dont use any "bad" methods of removing the links,

try and contact the best link providers and swap the names around.

1 good link could mean 5 new customers, so stay on good terms as those sites will not like to be linking to an adult site.

Think good things not bad

 

[Premiere]

I don't understand why you would be asked to hand over your domain. I would get a lawyer. That is your product as as a minor distributor you still own rights to sell under that property name and title. The master distributor cannot force you to do this so only the parent company can - and that is counter-productive action. Your asset should at least be one you can sell.

 

[dottvfan]

ahh i'll help with that one
(a) we won't be their distributor or distributing their product - although I accept we will have limited rights until such time we cease being their distributor (very soon)
(b) we can't forward as that will likely cause trade practices problems in the relevant country due to market confusion.

I suspect we will have a fight about the domain but I know we'll lose it once we have no legit rights to use.

 

[MicroGuy]

Is there anything in the contract that states you must use the domain? You could delete it from your account and let the new company take their chances at grabbing it. Just a thought.

 

[lzy]

you can ask google to remove the domain from there index.

Best thing you can do morally. :blink:

 

[dottvfan]

Best thing you can do morally. :blink:

I'm not sure why you think this. We have no problem giving them the domain name for their product once our relationship has finished. But that's all we think we should give them. Why should they get the benefit of our pagerank and SEO just to use it against us.

This is a brand we have built from scratch. We don't intend to hurt the brand.

 

[bbalegere]

Use google webmaster central to remove from google index.
Modify robots.txt and do not allow crawlers.
BAd MeThods
Add plenty of hidden links in your site.Google can detect hidden links and your page rank goes down.

 

[Michael]

Create a robots.txt file and upload it into your root directory. In the file, put this:

User-Agent: *
Noindex: /
Disallow: /

That should take you completely out of Google :tu:

Another thing you can do is put this code in the index page:

<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="unavailable_after: 31-Oct-2008 23:59:59 GMT">

Also, check your site stats and find which backlinks are resulting in the most traffic, contact the site owners, and get them to switch to your new URL. Also find out which backlinks have the highest page rank and switch those out too. They'll actually appreciate your follow up.

Good luck!

 

[dottvfan]

thanks for the responses. great tips

rep added

 

[Michael]

By the way, there is another method that doesn't require waiting for them to crawl your site again, and usually takes 3-5 business days:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=61062

I would still do the other methods I mentioned as well to take care of other search engines.